Kid Steals From Grandma And Spends It On Fortnite, Gets A 3- To 6-Year-Long Lesson From Uncle

This kid should have been punished much more seriously, but what can you do when the father does the same thing 🤔. The suggestions to send him a card in lieu of his gifts is a fantastic idea and exactly what I'd do with the balance ending on the card, to remind him that he someone is repaying this debt. Grandma needs protection from those two, to keep her money safe. I would have tried to arrange for him to work off some of the debt doing chores for her as well. Glad the uncle is looking out for everything.

No more video games for that kid and any other kid that does this. I've heard way too many stories about this and the kids do know what they're doing.

The nephew was not just stealing. He was committing Elder Abuse. It's a crime.

Get rid of her old card and get her a new one or call card company and and stop new payments to fortnite and all other game sites

wen i was in college a guy in my class came to class with $8000. we all asked y he had so much. his response...he was staying with his grandparents for the week and he found it in a box. we told him he stole it from his grandparents and wen he said no he found it in a box everyone ignored him for the rest of the year. i think his girlfriend even broke up with him too. i kno he lost alot of friends over tho. anyways turned out i knew his sister and she told me that the $8000 was payment money for their grandparents condo. her grandfather puts it in a box on his work desk with a post it saying wen payment is due. her parents took money out of his bank account to pay them back and since he didnt have enough they sold his xbox, and returned everything he bought with the money that could b returned. wen i asked how much hes left with she said $5 in both checkings and savings i laughed and says he doesnt even deserve to have that.

My Mom's step grandson stole a $100 Amazon gift card from her. She called Amazon to report it stolen (like they care) and they confirmed it had been used. They told her exactly what was purchased and who it was shipped to - yep step grandson was stupid enough to use his own name and had the items mailed TO HIS HOME ADDRESS. His Mother still wouldn't believe that he "would do such a thing". Oh, really? The heroin addict you've put through rehab 4 times is suddenly a choir boy? What really chaps my A$$ is the fact her husband wouldn't believe her either, even after reading the email response from Amazon. I always did think he was an absolute pu$$y.

I'll delete this if I get downvoted, just want a chance to say my piece even if y'all punish me for it. So. This is the dumbest s**t I ever heard. OP is punishing a kid for his own terrible boundary setting. Kids test boundaries all the time, it's what they do. They try something, see what happens and then decide if they want to do it again. Here's what they taught that kid: use the money without asking, say sorry, and nothing bad happens. Consequences should have come into play immediately. Starting with parental controls on the switch so password would be required for all purchases. Easy to do. Nintendo has a phone app for it, you can control everything from your phone.

A lesson unknown is not a lesson realized or taught. I would have been far more drastic: like taking his siblings and or cousins to 6 flags or Disney world but he could not go because his ticket money was paying grandma back..and this message would be delivered at the same time I gave out the gift card or road trip info to everyone else. " that 300.00 you STOLE from grandma will come out of your ticket so I'm sorry, maybe next time bud" It could be that or Dave n busters or Schlitterbahn which ever hurt the most for him being left out. I would go on to say there is NEVER any honor in cheating and sooner or later, it comes back to bite you. If his dad offered to pay for his ticket, fine but he is not going with us. No known thieves in the car this trip. YEAH I would DEVASTATE and it works: mother of 5 here, all college grads except 1 who is still in graphic design, and none have gone to jail or done many of the other things a lot of kids get into. They are ages 25-40 .

Oh no....oh no no no no. I'd give that little f*** a card every year, make him open it in front of everyone and write the following, "Instead of getting you a gift, I'm using money I would have given to pay your gramma back for the money you stole from her." Have him read it at Christmas dinner. I don't play when it comes to stealing, lying and cheating. Sorry the dad sounds like the same person too. Definitely NOT petty. Just because we encourage kids to be who ever they want to be when they grow up is NOT an encouragement for identity theft and credit card fraud.

This kid learned no lesson. The uncle did nothing. He should've had some choice words with this kid. Idve taken the kid to the batting cages and turned the ball machine on him....oops.

CANCEL CARD IMMEDIATELY! I liked one reader's suggestion: send their nephew a card saying, “$25 has been paid in your honor to the Grandmother Fortnite Fund.” The END GOAL IS TO TEACH THE NEPHEW A LESSON. If he is not aware of this being done, how is the nephew know any consequence? Your nephew is not going to learn from his father with dad setting example or teaching behavior consequences. I too have a sibling that as a grown man with kids took from mom. Mom did not have much. AFTER DAD DIED,, the GIMME started. If everyone went out to eat, he expected momma to pay 4 his family. Not as a 20 yr old but 40+ yr man. Refrigerator needed? Get mom,'s credit card. Later mom was getting DEMENTIA & brothers wife wrecks her car. Well, they get mom to attorney & unbeknownst to us, refinanced her little house to get funds out; to buy his wife a new car. & other things. The real kicker was the Social Media Posts bragging how he got his wife a new car. Questioned where the funds came from, the blow back to us was ugly. Uncovered he had mom paying his electric bills, DirectTV with NFL, new Flat Screen etc. Mom came to live with me for 9 yrs until her dementia became too bad.

Why on earth did they not have the bank reissue the card?

My little brother did this to my dad but he racked up THOUSANDS on Xbox live. My brother was using my live account which I hadn't used in years and had an obscure email for it that I also rarely used. One day I checked it and realized, over only a few months, my brother had made nearly $3000 in charges to my dad's card. I lost it, told my dad, and you know what he and my stepmother did? Nothing, my brother just got a 'talking to' and recieved a Nintendo switch the same day. We don't share a mother, it's clear we were raised very differently and I pray for him growing up with that sort of mentality. He did it again a few months later for another 1500 or so. If it wasn't my parents fault I might do this to teach him a lesson but I couldn't take it out on my brother when it's just the way he was raised. Hope the kid got a good lesson out of this!

If this ever happens again, just call to cancel the card. They’ll issue a new one to the same account but with new number, no charge.

I played fortnite on xbox one i ended up putting a password on purchase spending on mine when i noticed my money on console would disppear found one kid that spent bought vbucks without my permission so i went in my xbox and passworded the purchases and i only i know the password

Good on you for getting the money back for your mother. And I hope the nephew learns his lesson about stealing from family.

My brother had this problem as well, except one of the times it actually was an accident because he was high on pain killers.

I’m not sure the note or card thing saying that the amount is going to grandma’s Fortnite fund is an entirely good idea. Since he’s not getting money he never had, it’s not really a sacrifice to him to have the money redirected. It’s not costing him anything. I’m not saying it’s a totally bad idea. But it might give him the message that other people will take care of his debts. How about getting some awesome Fortnite player to destroy him online! Take him to the digital cleaners!

He needs much more punishment than just that. An adult stealing 300$ would go to jail, it won't end with just paying that money back and letting bygones be bygones. It's actually kind of a small amount so the sentence won't be that high, but someone that steals as a child will definitely so worse as an adult. The kid will quite likely end up in jail in the future. "It's the parents fault for not educating their kids properly" forget about it then. Putting the punishment aside, if something like this happens to me, I would certainly like to make the other party suffer. If possible, I would like to see the despair in their eyes.

Why is a 10-year-old even playing Fortnite? That game is intended for teens and older. Also, all you have to do is set parental controls and settings to disallow making credit card purchases. Thirdly, I don't know if I would ruin his Christmas for the next 6 years over it, maybe just ground him for a month or take away his switch for a few months and make him do chores and other things to earn the money to repay it.

Consider sorting your mom out with say a Revolut account. If you use yhe virtual card and someone miss uses ot you can immediately void the card and create a new one. But send the family a a card every year with a PS I am donating the money owed to mom's account.

I don't understand. If you don't know how to delete information out of something, that's fine. These days they purposely make it near impossible anyway. But why not just say the card was compromised and get a new one? At *least* freeze the card until you can talk to the bank, you know? I don't get it. Shouldn't had gone on that long.

This is actually a banking issue. With the in app purchases the bank uses the initial authorization for all future purchases from that game site. My young son overdrew his kid bank account making in app purchases and I questioned the bank as to why they kept authorizing charges when the bank account was negative. And that's when I found out that the initial authorization is good for lot more than just the initial purchase. I didn't know that and I wouldn't expect a kid to know that. OP's nephew is not a super sneak or a super thief. He's not diabolical. He's just a dumb kid who doesn't know how things work any better than an adult knows how these game sites work.

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This one is odd as the kid is the ah, that said the uncle is also a special type if a*****e who finds excuses to be horrible. This is not the lesson for a 10 year old and is just insane, there is something wrong with this man and how he attacks a 10 year old, he even came online for validation which he will get because this is thr internet and most people are horrible and self centered and look for ways to "get back at" anything they don't like. This is toxic and an adult doing it for 3 to 6 years to a 10 year old, this is deeply disturbing and a q0 year taking money is common and normal, then10 year old was a normal 10 year old and deserves punishment my parents or grandma, not crazy uncle and essentially not in this way. This is insane.